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http://snipurl.com/cpfc The New Yorker 14 February 2005 OUTSOURCING TORTURE The secret history of America's "extraordinary rendition" program. by JANE MAYER On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that �torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.� Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush�s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that �you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.� Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man�s brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan. During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of �the Special Removal Unit.� The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board. Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, �just began beating on me.� They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. �Not even animals could withstand it,� he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. �You just give up,� he said. �You become like an animal.� A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as �extraordinary rendition.� This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America�including torture. Arar is suing the U.S. government for his mistreatment. �They are outsourcing torture because they know it�s illegal,� he said. �Why, if they have suspicions, don�t they question people within the boundary of the law?� Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition�becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, �an abomination.� What began as a program aimed at a small, discrete set of suspects�people against whom there were outstanding foreign arrest warrants�came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the Administration terms �illegal enemy combatants.� Many of them have never been publicly charged with any crime. Scott Horton, an expert on international law who helped prepare a report on renditions issued by N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, estimates that a hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001. Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a member of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, said that a more precise number was impossible to obtain. �I�ve asked people at the C.I.A. for numbers,� he said. �They refuse to answer. All they will say is that they�re in compliance with the law.� Although the full scope of the extraordinary-rendition program isn�t known, several recent cases have come to light that may well violate U.S. law. In 1998, Congress passed legislation declaring that it is �the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.� The Bush Administration, however, has argued that the threat posed by stateless terrorists who draw no distinction between military and civilian targets is so dire that it requires tough new rules of engagement. This shift in perspective, labelled the New Paradigm in a memo written by Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, �places a high premium on . . . the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians,� giving less weight to the rights of suspects. It also questions many international laws of war. Five days after Al Qaeda�s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Vice-President Dick Cheney, reflecting the new outlook, argued, on �Meet the Press,� that the government needed to �work through, sort of, the dark side.� Cheney went on, �A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we�re going to be successful. That�s the world these folks operate in. And so it�s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.� The extraordinary-rendition program bears little relation to the system of due process afforded suspects in crimes in America. Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced onto a Gulfstream V jet, like the one described by Arar. This jet, which has been registered to a series of dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign Marketing, of Portland, Oregon, has clearance to land at U.S. military bases. Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts. The most common destinations for rendered suspects are Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan, all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture suspects. To justify sending detainees to these countries, the Administration appears to be relying on a very fine reading of an imprecise clause in the United Nations Convention Against Torture (which the U.S. ratified in 1994), requiring �substantial grounds for believing� that a detainee will be tortured abroad. Martin Lederman, a lawyer who left the Justice Department�s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002, after eight years, says, �The Convention only applies when you know a suspect is more likely than not to be tortured, but what if you kind of know? That�s not enough. So there are ways to get around it.� Administration officials declined to discuss the rendition program. But Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan expert on terrorist interrogations who has consulted with several intelligence agencies, argued that rough tactics �can save hundreds of lives.� He said, �When you capture a terrorist, he may know when the next operation will be staged, so it may be necessary to put a detainee under physical or psychological pressure. I disagree with physical torture, but sometimes the threat of it must be used.� Rendition is just one element of the Administration�s New Paradigm. The C.I.A. itself is holding dozens of �high value� terrorist suspects outside of the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., in addition to the estimated five hundred and fifty detainees in Guant�namo Bay, Cuba. The Administration confirmed the identities of at least ten of these suspects to the 9/11 Commission�including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a top Al Qaeda operative, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a chief planner of the September 11th attacks�but refused to allow commission members to interview the men, and would not say where they were being held. Reports have suggested that C.I.A. prisons are being operated in Thailand, Qatar, and Afghanistan, among other countries. At the request of the C.I.A., Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally ordered that a prisoner in Iraq be hidden from Red Cross officials for several months, and Army General Paul Kern told Congress that the C.I.A. may have hidden up to a hundred detainees. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, which established norms on the treatment of soldiers and civilians captured in war, require the prompt registration of detainees, so that their treatment can be monitored, but the Administration argues that Al Qaeda members and supporters, who are not part of a state-sponsored military, are not covered by the Conventions. The Bush Administration�s departure from international norms has been justified in intellectual terms by �lite lawyers like Gonzales, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School. Gonzales, the new Attorney General, argued during his confirmation proceedings that the U.N. Convention Against Torture�s ban on �cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment� of terrorist suspects does not apply to American interrogations of foreigners overseas. Perhaps surprisingly, the fiercest internal resistance to this thinking has come from people who have been directly involved in interrogation, including veteran F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Their concerns are as much practical as ideological. Years of experience in interrogation have led them to doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information. They also warn that the Bush Administration, having taken so many prisoners outside the realm of the law, may not be able to bring them back in. By holding detainees indefinitely, without counsel, without charges of wrongdoing, and under circumstances that could, in legal parlance, �shock the conscience� of a court, the Administration has jeopardized its chances of convicting hundreds of suspected terrorists, or even of using them as witnesses in almost any court in the world. �It�s a big problem,� Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the 9/11 Commission, says. �In criminal justice, you either prosecute the suspects or let them go. But if you�ve treated them in ways that won�t allow you to prosecute them you�re in this no man�s land. What do you do with these people?� The criminal prosecution of terrorist suspects has not been a priority for the Bush Administration, which has focussed, rather, on preventing additional attacks. But some people who have been fighting terrorism for many years are concerned about unintended consequences of the Administration�s radical legal measures. Among these critics is Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism expert who helped establish the practice of rendition. Scheuer left the agency in 2004, and has written two acerbic critiques of the government�s fight against Islamic terrorism under the pseudonym Anonymous, the most recent of which, �Imperial Hubris,� was a best-seller. Not long ago, Scheuer, who lives in northern Virginia, spoke openly for the first time about how he and several other top C.I.A. officials set up the program, in the mid-nineties. �It was begun in desperation, � he told me. At the time, he was the head of the C.I.A.�s Islamic-militant unit, whose job was to �detect, disrupt, and dismantle� terrorist operations. His unit spent much of 1996 studying how Al Qaeda operated; by the next year, Scheuer said, its mission was to try to capture bin Laden and his associates. He recalled, �We went to the White House��which was then occupied by the Clinton Administration��and they said, �Do it.�� He added that Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council, offered no advice. �He told me, �Figure it out by yourselves,�� Scheuer said. (Clarke did not respond to a request for comment.) Scheuer sought the counsel of Mary Jo White, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who, along with a small group of F.B.I. agents, was pursuing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. In 1998, White�s team obtained an indictment against bin Laden, authorizing U.S. agents to bring him and his associates to the United States to stand trial. From the start, though, the C.I.A. was wary of granting terrorism suspects the due process afforded by American law. The agency did not want to divulge secrets about its intelligence sources and methods, and American courts demand transparency. Even establishing the chain of custody of key evidence�such as a laptop computer�could easily pose a significant problem: foreign governments might refuse to testify in U.S. courts about how they had obtained the evidence, for fear of having their secret co�peration exposed. (Foreign governments often worried about retaliation from their own Muslim populations.) The C.I.A. also felt that other agencies sometimes stood in its way. In 1996, for example, the State Department stymied a joint effort by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to question one of bin Laden�s cousins in America, because he had a diplomatic passport, which protects the holder from U.S. law enforcement. Describing the C.I.A.�s frustration, Scheuer said, �We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we couldn�t capture them because we had nowhere to take them.� The agency realized that �we had to come up with a third party.� The obvious choice, Scheuer said, was Egypt. The largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel, Egypt was a key strategic ally, and its secret police force, the Mukhabarat, had a reputation for brutality. Egypt had been frequently cited by the State Department for torture of prisoners. According to a 2002 report, detainees were �stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused with cold water [and] sexually assaulted.� Hosni Mubarak, Egypt�s leader, who came to office in 1981, after President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists, was determined to crack down on terrorism. His prime political enemies were radical Islamists, hundreds of whom had fled the country and joined Al Qaeda. Among these was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician from Cairo, who went to Afghanistan and eventually became bin Laden�s deputy. In 1995, Scheuer said, American agents proposed the rendition program to Egypt, making clear that it had the resources to track, capture, and transport terrorist suspects globally�including access to a small fleet of aircraft. Egypt embraced the idea. �What was clever was that some of the senior people in Al Qaeda were Egyptian,� Scheuer said. �It served American purposes to get these people arrested, and Egyptian purposes to get these people back, where they could be interrogated.� Technically, U.S. law requires the C.I.A. to seek �assurances� from foreign governments that rendered suspects won�t be tortured. Scheuer told me that this was done, but he was �not sure� if any documents confirming the arrangement were signed. A series of spectacular covert operations followed from this secret pact. On September 13, 1995, U.S. agents helped kidnap Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt�s most wanted terrorists, in Croatia. Qassem had fled to Europe after being linked by Egypt to the assassination of Sadat; he had been sentenced to death in absentia. Croatian police seized Qassem in Zagreb and handed him over to U.S. agents, who interrogated him aboard a ship cruising the Adriatic Sea and then took him back to Egypt. Once there, Qassem disappeared. There is no record that he was put on trial. Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist who covers human-rights issues, said, �We believe he was executed.� A more elaborate operation was staged in Tirana, Albania, in the summer of 1998. According to the Wall Street Journal, the C.I.A. provided the Albanian intelligence service with equipment to wiretap the phones of suspected Muslim militants. Tapes of the conversations were translated into English, and U.S. agents discovered that they contained lengthy discussions with Zawahiri, bin Laden�s deputy. The U.S. pressured Egypt for assistance; in June, Egypt issued an arrest warrant for Shawki Salama Attiya, one of the militants. Over the next few months, according to the Journal, Albanian security forces, working with U.S. agents, killed one suspect and captured Attiya and four others. These men were bound, blindfolded, and taken to an abandoned airbase, then flown by jet to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees. Two other suspects, who had been sentenced to death in absentia, were hanged. On August 5, 1998, an Arab-language newspaper in London published a letter from the International Islamic Front for Jihad, in which it threatened retaliation against the U.S. for the Albanian operation�in a �language they will understand.� Two days later, the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing two hundred and twenty-four people. The U.S. began rendering terror suspects to other countries, but the most common destination remained Egypt. The partnership between the American and the Egyptian intelligence services was extraordinarily close: the Americans could give the Egyptian interrogators questions they wanted put to the detainees in the morning, Scheuer said, and get answers by the evening. The Americans asked to question suspects directly themselves, but, Scheuer said, the Egyptians refused. �We were never in the same room at the same time.� Scheuer claimed that �there was a legal process� undergirding these early renditions. Every suspect who was apprehended, he said, had been convicted in absentia. Before a suspect was captured, a dossier was prepared containing the equivalent of a rap sheet. The C.I.A.�s legal counsel signed off on every proposed operation. Scheuer said that this system prevented innocent people from being subjected to rendition. �Langley would never let us proceed unless there was substance,� he said. Moreover, Scheuer emphasized, renditions were pursued out of expedience��not out of thinking it was the best policy.� Since September 11th, as the number of renditions has grown, and hundreds of terrorist suspects have been deposited indefinitely in places like Guant�namo Bay, the shortcomings of this approach have become manifest. �Are we going to hold these people forever?� Scheuer asked. �The policymakers hadn�t thought what to do with them, and what would happen when it was found out that we were turning them over to governments that the human-rights world reviled.� Once a detainee�s rights have been violated, he says, �you absolutely can�t� reinstate him into the court system. �You can�t kill him, either,� he added. �All we�ve done is create a nightmare.� On a bleak winter day in Trenton, New Jersey, Dan Coleman, an ex-F.B.I. agent who retired last July, because of asthma, scoffed at the idea that a C.I.A. agent was now having compunctions about renditions. The C.I.A., Coleman said, liked rendition from the start. �They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again,� he said. �They were proud of it.� For ten years, Coleman worked closely with the C.I.A. on counter-terrorism cases, including the Embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. His methodical style of detective work, in which interrogations were aimed at forging relationships with detainees, became unfashionable after September 11th, in part because the government was intent on extracting information as quickly as possible, in order to prevent future attacks. Yet the more patient approach used by Coleman and other agents had yielded major successes. In the Embassy-bombings case, they helped convict four Al Qaeda operatives on three hundred and two criminal counts; all four men pleaded guilty to serious terrorism charges. The confessions the F.B.I. agents elicited, and the trial itself, which ended in May, 2001, created an invaluable public record about Al Qaeda, including details about its funding mechanisms, its internal structure, and its intention to obtain weapons of mass destruction. (The political leadership in Washington, unfortunately, did not pay sufficient attention.) Coleman is a political nonpartisan with a law-and-order mentality. His eldest son is a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan. Yet Coleman was troubled by the Bush Administration�s New Paradigm. Torture, he said, �has become bureaucratized.� Bad as the policy of rendition was before September 11th, Coleman said, �afterward, it really went out of control.� He explained, �Now, instead of just sending people to third countries, we�re holding them ourselves. We�re taking people, and keeping them in our own custody in third countries. That�s an enormous problem.� Egypt, he pointed out, at least had an established legal system, however harsh. �There was a process there,� Coleman said. �But what�s our process? We have no method over there other than our laws�and we�ve decided to ignore them. What are we now, the Huns? If you don�t talk to us, we�ll kill you?� >From the beginning of the rendition program, Coleman said, there was no doubt that Egypt engaged in torture. He recalled the case of a suspect in the first World Trade Center bombing who fled to Egypt. The U.S. requested his return, and the Egyptians handed him over�wrapped head to toe in duct tape, like a mummy. (In another incident, an Egyptian with links to Al Qaeda who had co�perated with the U.S. government in a terrorism trial was picked up in Cairo and imprisoned by Egyptian authorities until U.S. diplomats secured his release. For days, he had been chained to a toilet, where guards had urinated on him.) Under such circumstances, it might seem difficult for the U.S. government to legally justify dispatching suspects to Egypt. But Coleman said that since September 11th the C.I.A. �has seemed to think it�s operating under different rules, that it has extralegal abilities outside the U.S.� Agents, he said, have �told me that they have their own enormous office of general counsel that rarely tells them no. Whatever they do is all right. It all takes place overseas.� Coleman was angry that lawyers in Washington were redefining the parameters of counter-terrorism interrogations. �Have any of these guys ever tried to talk to someone who�s been deprived of his clothes?� he asked. �He�s going to be ashamed, and humiliated, and cold. He�ll tell you anything you want to hear to get his clothes back. There�s no value in it.� Coleman said that he had learned to treat even the most despicable suspects as if there were �a personal relationship, even if you can�t stand them.� He said that many of the suspects he had interrogated expected to be tortured, and were stunned to learn that they had rights under the American system. Due process made detainees more compliant, not less, Coleman said. He had also found that a defendant�s right to legal counsel was beneficial not only to suspects but also to law-enforcement officers. Defense lawyers frequently persuaded detainees to co�perate with prosecutors, in exchange for plea agreements. �The lawyers show these guys there�s a way out,� Coleman said. �It�s human nature. People don�t co�perate with you unless they have some reason to.� He added, �Brutalization doesn�t work. We know that. Besides, you lose your soul.� continued... _____________________________ Note: This message comes from the peace-justice-news e-mail mailing list of articles and commentaries about peace and social justice issues, activism, etc. If you do not regularly receive mailings from this list or have received this message as a forward from someone else and would like to be added to the list, send a blank e-mail with the subject "subscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or you can visit: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news Go to that same web address to view the list's archives or to unsubscribe. E-mail accounts that become full, inactive or out of order for more than a few days will be deleted from this list. FAIR USE NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the information in this e-mail is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. 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